Tell Regulators to Stop Funding Dirty Fuel Cells with Your Money

We are paying for clean green power in our power bills and receiving dirty and expensive power instead. The CPUC hands out tens of millions of dollars of our money each year to Bloom Energy a company that uses fossil fuel to generate dirty and unaffordable power. This giveaway of our money needs to stop. Clean renewable and affordable power needs to be funded not this company that provides the exact opposite of what is needed.

California leads the country in clean energy innovation. One of the state’s key incentives for emerging clean technologies is the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), which gives out tens of millions of dollars each year to qualifying technologies, such as small-scale wind turbines, combined heat and power generation, or battery storage. SGIP is funded by California utilities’ ratepayers and is supposed to encourage development in innovative clean technologies.

So why is most of the money going to a fossil fuel-based company with political connections?

Bloom Energy has received over $250 hundred million dollars of SGIP funding for over a decade – yet their natural gas fuel cells are actually dirtier than California’s current energy portfolio. Natural gas fuel cells aren’t even an emerging technology they are a Betamax technology. I should know – I wrote a book on them. The book Hydrogen – Hope or Hype? is a primer on energy and sustainability.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which runs SGIP, is considering amending the rules for the program, so dirty technologies like Bloom’s can’t gobble up ratepayer dollars. It’s crucial that we tell them not to spend our money funding a company like Bloom Energy that has been shown to greenwash their emissions and also hide their solid waste with sulfur. Yes the pipeline gas used by a fuel cell has sulfur compounds that are filtered out and then the desulfurization canisters are taken to a processing facility just like oil refinery waste. My documentary film will chronicle the entire gangrene saga I have termed the Bloomdoggle.

Tell the PUC you no longer want to fund this Bloomdoggle.

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